It sounds like such a simple solution, but when British blues guitarist Alvin Lee penned those words in 1971, he probably wasn't pondering the U.S. tax code.

As Congress and the administration gear up for another round of deficit-reduction proposals, though, it's becoming increasingly clear that without reforming the tax code, the debate will remain split along the usual partisan lines of raising or lowering taxes on the rich.

On Monday, President Barack Obama outlined a plan to pay for his jobs bill by doing just that - raising taxes on millionaires. Critics have accused Obama of class warfare, but it's not that simple.

What the president is really staking out is a messy guerrilla insurgency of tax policy. He's essentially proposing a second alternative minimum tax, which originally was designed to catch the wealthy who avoided taxes. These days, it ensnares many who make between $200,000 and $500,000 a year, yet it misses many of the wealthiest taxpayers it was designed to catch.

Rather than doubling down on a failed policy, though, the president should look at what's happening at the other end of the income scale, where the flaws in the tax code are easier to see.

Too many loopholes

The rich have long used tax shelters and loopholes to escape paying their full amount of taxes, but much the same thing now happens among lower wage earners.

In other words, it isn't that the rich have too many loopholes, it's that, from a tax policy standpoint, everyone does.

Last year, 47 percent of Americans owed no federal income tax, the center found.

The percentage of the population that doesn't pay taxes has swelled in recent years, thanks in part to the recession, but mostly because of a long-standing policy of enacting social programs through the tax code.

The tax code is awash in gimmies: credits for kids, deductions for interest on college loans, mortgages, contributions to retirement accounts and so forth.

Rather than increase federal spending to promote these sorts of benefits, Congress chose to create incentives in the tax code. After all, there's more political mileage in offering tax breaks than increasing spending, even though the effect on the deficit is the same.

If you count corporations, the U.S. loses about $1.2 trillion a year in tax credits, special exclusions, deductions and other provisions, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. That's about the same amount of tax revenue that's collected in a typical year.

Rich are easy targets

Most of these special breaks benefit the wealthy. Williams said 60 percent of them go to people in the top income bracket. But the remaining 20 percent are enough to zero out a growing number of lower-income earners.

With fewer people paying taxes, the president is limited in where he can go for new sources of revenue. The rich are the easy target.

The president's plan, though, is more a political ploy than serious policy initiative. Likewise, his Republican opponents are calling for more tax credits and provisions, which will only add to the tax code's muddle. Neither side is tackling the bigger problem: the tax code itself.

A better solution would be a 1986-style tax reform, a bipartisan effort that strips the tax code of all the special provisions that have been added in the past 25 years. The result would be lower rates for everyone but fewer exemptions. That would create a broader base that would recapture much of the $1.2 trillion that is being left on the table.

Politically, though, it's not as catchy as the refrain of "tax the rich."